Signs and Wonders

The Only Child

It all started when Sophie came home from college, between her sophomore and junior years. She wasn’t happy to be back. She’d grown to love Boston, the depressing, blustery winters, the intricate one-ways and roundabouts, and felt she’d outgrown California and its sunny, childlike weather. Worst of all was her mother. Sophie was an only child, and her mother had always clung to her. She tiptoed into her room at night to watch her sleep. As a child Sophie hadn’t noticed, but now that she was older she usually wasn’t asleep yet when her mother came in, and she’d look up from her book and say, “What are you looking at?”

Which only made her mother smile affectionately and back out of the room. By late June Sophie couldn’t take it anymore; she went over to her friend Beena’s house and they called up Trevor, their high-school drug connection, and got a dime bag and some Ecstasy, and suddenly it was four in the morning and Sophie drove home at breakneck speed only to find her parents still up, waiting.

“You guys,” she said, “you’re driving me crazy.”

Her mother was crying.

“It’s not that bad,” Sophie said. “I was just out late. At school I do this all the time. I mean, not all the time. But you know what I mean.”

“We have to tell you something,” her father said. “We should’ve told you a long time ago.” He was a serious man, her father, prone to ominous pronouncements about issues he had no ability to affect. “This real-estate bubble will burst very soon,” he’d say while barbecuing chicken. Or: “Gas prices will go up much farther before they ever go down.”

So Sophie wasn’t that concerned when she sat down to hear what they had to say. She hadn’t steeled herself for any news in particular, and this, in addition to the drugs, was probably why, in the future, she could never remember the exact words in which her parents told her that she was not, after all, an only child.

She had an older brother who’d been given up for adoption, and for all these years they’d never known where he was.

“We were very young,” her mother said. “We weren’t married yet. You didn’t know my parents, Sophie, but they were very strict. We had the baby, then gave him up. Eventually we got married and had you, and that was wonderful. But I’ve thought about him every day since he was born. I was so happy when we got his letter today, saying he wanted to meet us.”

At this point she had to stop talking, because she was crying so hard. She could hardly breathe. Sophie crossed the room and sat down next to her mother, who melted against her shoulder. On the opposite side, Sophie’s father held her hand.

The brother she’d never known existed, Philip, lived in New York City and was an investment banker. His adoptive parents had given him a good life, with good schools and love. He didn’t want anything from her parents, only to meet them. Her mother wrote back that they’d love to see him and told him about Sophie. Two weeks later the phone rang. Philip was going to be in L.A. on business the following week. He wanted to meet, but not at the house. Her mother said they’d all be there.

That morning her mother put on and discarded every item of clothing in her closet. Sophie was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and it was her father, who ordinarily never noticed her appearance, who asked her to change into something a little nicer. “This occasion,” he said, “is something we’ll remember forever. Not many days are like that, pumpkin.”

So she put on a dress. She still hadn’t decided how she felt about anything. She’d never thought about having a brother. She’d always wanted a sister, someone to confide in and whisper with at night after the lights were out. Someone mischievous and fun, down-to-earth, not dreamy like her mother — though now she understood what her mother had been dreaming about.

They waited at a Taco Bell on the freeway, holding medium-sized Cokes. The three of them always ordered mediums, never smalls or larges. They were a family that took the middle road. The door opened and a man in a suit came in and stood there looking around. Her mother gasped. Sophie felt a strong wind shake her arms and spine, a buffeting force. Red hair and green eyes, freckles, a square face and a round nose, a flush on his cheeks and a wrinkle that ran straight across his forehead. All this time there had been someone in the world who looked exactly like her.

Philip came toward them, unsmiling, and sat down. “This is awkward,” he said. “Hello.”

“I know,” her mother said, then bit her lower lip.

Sophie leaned forward. “Would you like something? We have drinks, I could get you something.”

He looked at her — she saw it register on his face, how much they looked alike — and smiled stiffly. “Sure,” he said. “Root beer, a large? Thanks.”

Sophie felt stung. She hated root beer. Of course she understood this didn’t mean anything, but she thought it meant everything. The situation made everything symbolic, made everything, even root beer, carry too much weight.

When she got back to the table her parents and Philip were talking about the weather. They didn’t seem able to move any deeper into the conversation, to say the things they wanted to say. She sat there feeling annoyed with all of them and the spindly artifice of small talk. She didn’t realize that there were some things that couldn’t be said, that these were the most important things, and that everyone except her knew it. After she married her first husband, Lars, ten years later, she would tell him constantly, effusively, how much she loved him and how much he meant to her. And Lars would hold her hand and nod, his silences driving her crazy, so crazy after a while that she went off and slept with his best friend and business partner, Joe, who was short and squat and called her “Cookie” in bed, and the act wasn’t even finished before she started hating both him and herself. Afterward she came home and found Lars sitting in the living room with a drink. She could either tell him or not tell him. She still loved him. Instead of telling him she stopped taking her birth control pills and got pregnant, and that’s how they had Sara. During her pregnancy Lars broke off his partnership with Joe even though it left them at a terrible financial disadvantage, and Sophie was so angry at this — about to have a child, they needed to be stable, plus there were house and car payments to think about — and hormonal that she cried and raged and threatened to leave him. And Lars said quietly, “But I have to. Don’t you see?”

She understood then he’d known about her and Joe all along, that he was trying for a fresh start. And she was grateful, and wanted it to work so badly; but it didn’t.

This was later. At the time, at Taco Bell, she had no idea how small talk was protecting them from the scabrous weight of the past. All she knew was that her mother asked Philip for the story of his life, and he told it, and then her parents talked about their business, Sophie’s college in Boston, their house, even the perennials they were trying to grow in the garden. It was a conversation people might have on an airplane.

As they were leaving, Philip turned to her. “You and I live so close to each other,” he said. “You should come visit me in the fall, when you go back to school.”

“I don’t know,” Sophie said. Her mother, who hadn’t wanted her to live in a coed dorm, who worried when she took a cab from school to the airport, was nodding vehemently.

“You can stay with me and my girlfriend. I’ll tease you and pull your hair, or whatever a big brother’s supposed to do. We’ll figure it out. You’ll like Fiona, she’s nice. All this was actually her idea, me getting in touch with you guys.”

“Oh,” Sophie’s mother said softly, as if punched.

“Not that I hadn’t thought about it myself,” he added.

· · ·

Sophie went back to school and in October, on Columbus Day weekend, she took the train to New York. She’d been there once before, with her roommate, who was from Long Island. They stayed in the suburbs and, during their one day in Manhattan, went to FAO Schwarz. This time she took a taxi from Penn Station to the Upper West Side, where her brother — saying it, inside her mind, still gave her an intense but not entirely unpleasant shiver — lived.

They’d arranged this on the phone. “I’ll still be at work when you get here,” Philip had told her. “But Fiona will let you in and entertain you until dinner.”

“Okay,” Sophie said.

“We’ll show you a good time, don’t worry,” he said. “And we can call your mom on the phone while you’re here, so she knows you’re all right.”

Sophie wondered why he said your mom. But of course he had his own mom, who lived in Philadelphia and was also a banker. His father was an orthodontist.

The building’s doorman asked Sophie’s name, made a call, then carried her backpack to the elevator and pressed the button, as if the task would be too much for her. Upstairs, Fiona was waiting with the door open, smiling. She looked like a movie star, with straight, glossy brown hair and manicured fingernails. Grabbing the backpack, she threw her arm around Sophie’s shoulder and gently pushed her into the apartment, all the while offering drinks, food, a shower.

“We’ll make up the couch for you later,” she said. “I’m sorry there isn’t a spare room, but this is New York. We all live like sardines. We’re going to move soon, I swear, but looking for a place is such a nightmare. Have a seat. It’s so great to meet you. God, you look just like him, don’t you? Didn’t that freak you out?”

It was the first time anyone had mentioned the weirdness of the situation to her. Everybody else, her parents, her new brother, seemed intent on making it seem ordinary, which it manifestly wasn’t. At this onslaught of honesty Sophie felt grateful, even close to tears.

“It’s incredibly strange,” she said.

“Must be,” Fiona said. “But also good, right? I mean, here you have somebody else who’s part of your family. Somebody else to care for you.”

Sophie hadn’t considered it that way at all. “I guess I’m still getting used to it,” she said.

At eight, she and Fiona went out to a French restaurant. Her brother arrived twenty minutes late, trailing a briefcase and apologies, then insisted on ordering for her.

“Have you had oysters?” he asked. “What about snails? Have you had steak tartare, ever, in your life? I bet you didn’t have snails growing up in California.”

She hadn’t, and didn’t want them now, but felt it would be rude to refuse. She thought he was testing her. She didn’t realize that he felt he had something to prove, that his entire life — what he’d been given, what he’d become — was under scrutiny. Fiona sat back and didn’t talk much, just smiled at both of them. Philip ordered the snails and a bottle of Bordeaux and Fiona pushed her glass over to Sophie, letting her drink most of it. Philip kept asking her questions. What was their house like, what kind of after-school activities did she do, what did she think of her high school, what did she get on her SATs? It felt like a job interview.

“You must be smart, you got into a good college,” he said. “What are you going to do after you graduate? If you moved to New York, I could help you. I have some connections. The world’s about connections, you know. That’s something I didn’t realize in college, but it’s totally true.”

“I was thinking maybe grad school?” Sophie said. She didn’t want to let go of the life she’d only just discovered. It was the first time she’d ever felt like an adult, and she couldn’t imagine that there would be other places she might feel that way, other ways she could grow up.

Philip laughed. “Everybody here’s either dropping out of grad school or just about to go back. You’ll fit in perfectly.”

He ordered dessert for the table but didn’t have any himself. Sophie and Fiona shared it, their spoons digging into the meringue. Close enough to smell Fiona’s perfume, she noticed the diamond engagement ring on her left hand.

The next day, Fiona offered her a menu of activities: the Guggenheim, MoMA, the Met. “We don’t have to do anything big and touristy,” Sophie said. “Just walking around is good.”

Philip nodded, and Fiona smiled. “That’s such a smart thing to say. It’s so true that you see more of a city that way.” Sophie felt that she’d done well. “Let’s go to Chinatown and then we can have some pasta in Little Italy, maybe walk around SoHo. How does that sound?”

“Perfect,” Sophie said.

They took a cab downtown. The streets in Chinatown were mobbed. While holding hands with Philip, Fiona pointed things out to Sophie: Chanel knockoff purses, an art-supply store, the ducks hanging in shop windows. Next they moved over to Little Italy, where they had lunch. All the talk was about what it was like to live in New York, the various difficulties and advantages, the rents, the stresses. It was an urban version of her parents’ friends sitting around talking about their houses and yards. Having this revelation made Sophie feel wise. She thought that this was maturity, the ability to see through people. Only later did she find out that anyone could see through people, and the hard thing was not to try.

After lunch Fiona said she was tired, so they went back to the apartment. Before taking a nap, she suggested that Sophie and Philip call California.

It was one in the afternoon there, and Sophie’s mother was outside gardening. “Are you having a good time?” she asked, sounding a little breathless.

“Of course,” Sophie said, knowing that this was what she wanted to hear, yet unable to bring herself to rave or brim over with stories.

“Put him on?” her mother said.

Sophie handed the phone to her brother, who stood with the receiver pressed to his ear, smiling politely. Was he good-looking? Sophie couldn’t say. His face was long, like hers; his nose had a bump in it. If without knowing anything she’d passed him on the street, would she have noticed him, or somehow felt a connection?

“Soph,” he said, still smiling, but now holding out the phone.

When she put it to her ear she could hear her mother crying. “Are you okay?”

“I’m great,” her mother said, the worst liar ever. “I’m just so happy.”

In the background she could hear her father’s voice but not the specific words. Whatever they were, she knew he was trying to comfort her. In the future, after he retired, this tendency would grow even stronger. He’d start cooking for her, three meals a day, even after she got sick, and he’d shadow her from room to room, just as Sophie’s mother had once done to her. Her mother, irritable from pain, would complain about this to Sophie while he was in the kitchen straining broth into homemade soup. Once she died, of liver cancer, Sophie expected him to fade into the shadows himself, to lose his purpose, or to move into her own home. By then she was living with her second husband, sharing custody of Sara with Lars and of Mark’s son, Henry, with his ex-wife, a rotating parade of children and schedules that had to be carefully regulated and updated on wall calendars lest total chaos ensue. But her father seemed happy in his own routine, walking two miles every day and scrupulously following the news. Not until then did she realize he was the most self-sufficient person she’d ever known, and that her mother, the doter, the worrier, the maker of phone calls, had been the most in need of care.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Sophie said now. “We’re having a nice time.”

“Please remember everything,” her mother said, “and be sure to tell me later.”

“I’ll try,” Sophie said. She hung up and looked for Philip — wanting to commiserate, for a glance to pass between them — but he was in the kitchen already, talking to Fiona and pouring himself a glass of wine.

They were supposed to go out to dinner again, but after two glasses of wine Philip said he was tired, wanted to order in Chinese and stay home. This sounded fine to Sophie, but Fiona didn’t like the idea.

“Sophie’s only in town for the weekend,” she said. “We should be taking her to the Russian Tea Room or something.”

“The Tea Room’s closed, babe,” he said, with a touch of irritation.

“I said or something.”

“Anyway, she’s cool with it. Right?”

Sophie nodded slightly, afraid of overcommitting to his side of the disagreement. When her parents fought, they did so in their bedroom, at night, keeping their voices down and the door closed. She was thirteen before she figured out that they ever argued about anything, although this, she now knew, was the least of their secrets.

“Of course she’s cool with it,” Fiona said. She was standing with her arms folded in front of her, and Sophie couldn’t be sure but it seemed like tears were glimmering in her eyes. “She doesn’t know what the other options are. That’s why we should come up with something. You always want to do the least difficult thing.”

“And that’s wrong?” Philip said. Then he poured himself another glass of wine, clearly an act of defiance. There was a kind of electrical current in the room, like just before a thunderstorm.

Fiona started to cry.

Sophie wanted to disappear, but the only other room was their bedroom, and she couldn’t very well go in there. “We can do whatever,” she said. “I’m easy.”

Fiona looked at her and tried to smile. “You’re such a sweetheart,” she said, then added bitterly, “It’s hard to believe you’re related.”

“Hey,” Philip said.

Sophie tried again. “Maybe we could have dinner here, and then you and I could do something,” she told Fiona. “A movie or something. There must be tons of stuff I couldn’t see anywhere else.”

“This isn’t about you and me spending time together,” Fiona snapped.

Sophie stepped back. And then again, to sit down.

“You get these ideas, and you can’t handle any deviation,” Philip said. “Everything has to go according to your plan.”

“There’s nothing wrong with having a plan,” Fiona said. “If you don’t have a plan, you don’t get anywhere.”

“Maybe I like where I am.”

“I have to push you to do everything. If it weren’t for me, you’d never do anything. You’d just live here alone for the rest of your life. That’s what you want, isn’t?”

“It’s looking pretty good right about now,” Philip said.

Fiona went into the bedroom, leaving Sophie and her brother alone.

Philip ordered Chinese without asking her what she wanted, and the two of them watched basketball. He switched to beer and gave her one, which she drank quickly. The second she pulled out of the fridge herself. An hour later Fiona came out of the bedroom carrying her jacket and walked straight out the door without saying anything.

“Are you going after her?” Sophie said.

Her brother shrugged. “She can take care of herself.”

Sophie thought of her parents worrying every time she left the house, how her mother sometimes called her first thing in the morning at school, as if she might not have survived the night, and about how they both cried when they left her in Boston at the beginning of college, Sophie herself dry-eyed and itching to be alone. Now she too walked out of the apartment.

“Hey,” Philip said, but that was the extent of his interference. After riding the elevator down, Sophie stood in the street wondering where Fiona had gone. Though it was late there were still tons of people out walking around, there were cabs and cars. A person could go anywhere and do anything. It was cold. Nobody looked at her; nobody asked what she was doing. Helpless, wordless, she went back inside. By the time she fell asleep on the couch, Fiona still hadn’t come home.

Her train wasn’t until noon, and Sophie woke up worrying about how to get through the last few hours of the visit. But Fiona and Philip were in the kitchen making French toast. Sitting up, she saw that he had his arms around her waist, and Fiona was laughing, a low, sweet murmur. Then they started kissing. If Sophie’s parents had never fought in front of her, they’d never kissed in front of her either, a discretion she approved of completely. As she watched, Fiona moved one of Philip’s hands so his palm lay flat on her stomach, and she rubbed it against herself, as if she were a magic lantern.

She faked sleep until Fiona shook her shoulder gently. Together they stripped the couch, folding the blanket as Sophie been taught to in Girl Scouts, Fiona holding one end and Sophie walking the other up to her and pressing it to her chest.

Fiona’s eyes were sparkling. “Thanks for coming to look for me last night,” she said.

“Oh, it was nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. He learned something from you. He doesn’t understand things sometimes, because of how he grew up. He thinks everybody gets to choose who they love.”

Sophie didn’t know what this meant, but nodded as if she did. Then Philip served the French toast. He was in a great mood and kept telling Sophie that she had to come back, that the couch would be reserved for her.

“Consider it your pied-à-terre,” he told her.

She didn’t know what this meant, either, but could tell he was proud of the phrase. Over the three days they’d spent together she’d at least learned this much about him.

They ate breakfast while reading the newspaper. After a while Sophie took a shower and packed her bag. She was already thinking about school, the party she’d missed by being here, what she’d say to her mother when she called that night.

“Hey,” Philip said, “what are you doing for Thanksgiving? You could spent it here with us.”

“I’m supposed to go home,” Sophie said. She bit her lip, hesitating, then took a chance. “Why don’t you guys come out there? Mom and Dad would love it.”

“We’ll see,” Fiona said. She was standing next to Philip, moving her left hand with its bright engagement ring up and down his arm. “I’m not sure I’ll feel up to traveling. As you can tell, I’m already pretty hormonal.”

Sophie looked at her brother.

“Fiona’s pregnant,” he said.

“Oh, wow,” Sophie said, as Fiona stared at her with an expectant smile. “Congratulations,” she remembered to say.

“Thank you! We’re thrilled,” Fiona said, and her stroking picked up its pace. She was beaming. This was her show; the whole weekend, Sophie thought, had been her show. Even the letter. She thought of how her mother had sounded on the day the letter came, when she said, “I always thought of him, wondering where he was, every minute of every day.” Unspoken was the idea that, somewhere off in the world, he had been thinking of her too.

“I should go,” Sophie said.

They offered to take her to the station, but Sophie refused. She wanted to be alone, to plan her phone call that evening. It was as if we’d known each other all our lives. It was her turn now to leave out everything that couldn’t be said. The last thing her brother offered, as she left, was “Keep in touch,” as if they were high school friends whom college choices might force apart. Fiona jumped in: they had friends in Boston, so they’d come visit and take Sophie and her roommate out to dinner. Sophie believed her. She would drag Philip to Boston and probably, eventually, to California, taking him everywhere there was family, people to whom he was connected.

Indeed, this is what happened. The child was born and named Andrew, and he looked like Sophie and Philip: the same red hair, the same boxy face. When Fiona brought him to California, she presented him like a trophy to Sophie’s mother, who exclaimed happily over him, and said all the right things, and it wasn’t until after the visitors left that she locked herself in the bedroom and cried over everything she had lost: a whole child’s future, a whole child’s past.

On a drunken Thanksgiving years later, Fiona would confess to Sophie that she wanted to have other children after Andrew, but that Philip was against it; too much money and time would be required. “He doesn’t understand about family,” she said, this initial grain of suspicion having hardened to a sturdy pearl. Sophie, with four glasses of wine in her and struggling through divorce, could only nod exhaustedly, too drunk to remember Fiona as a young woman aglow with her child and her confidence and her love. Whether she remembered it or not, though, this was the end of her own childhood: the day she left Fiona and her brother in New York, Fiona waving good-bye with one hand and holding on to Philip with the other, as if without this tether he might float away into some other orbit. This escape Fiona would not allow. Instead she held his arm and smiled at Sophie, her eyes sparkling fervently, amply sparkling, as if she felt so full of love that she could afford to give some away.